I'm 38 and have been playing games for over 30 years.
GTAV is my favorite game of all time so I'm certainly not "shitting on it", and I'm not talking about freedom. I'm talking about that feeling like when you stand in front of a house IRL vs in a game.
I'm not talking about map size where driving from one end to another would take a day - they did something like that with Fuel (I think it was an hour or something) and it was fucking boring.
It takes maybe 15-20 minutes to drive through the average city, I'm guessing. Games like GTA are saying "hey, let's make the map bigger - let's make it a whole GROUP of cities", but what I wish they'd do is make the cities smaller, with a stronger focus on density and scale. One city, 15 minutes one side to the other, instead of traversing multiple cities in five minutes. Doesn't have to be populated with millions of people or have every building accessible. I think the current technology can handle everything minus that, but once the scale and density are down then the technology of the future can fill in the population and other details.
I guess that's where I was going.